Radeon HD 3850 512MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has core speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3850 512MB		75 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (33%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M290X is 190% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		52992 MB/sec
	Difference: 100608 (190%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be much (more or less 536%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 57312 (536%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X will be much (more or less 154%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 3850 512MB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 512MB		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16512 (154%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.